A Comparison Of Grammaticalization Of Prenominal And Postnominal Type Of Relative Clauses

Previous studies on the grammaticalization of relative clause structures almost exclusively focus on the postnominal type because of the lack of authentic data on the development of the prenominal type. Furthermore, a comparative analysis of grammaticalization of prenominal and postnominal types of relative clauses has never been carried out. Consequently, speculations proposed about the evolution of relative clauses are only valid for the postnominal type. In this thesis, research on the grammaticalization of relative clauses is extended to the prenominal type typically represented by examples from Chinese which enjoys a privileged status of having a recorded history of over three millennia. Two groups of data are collected and analyzed, that is, examples from previous studies and corpora data. It is shown that the prenominal and postnominal types of relative clauses experienced different pathway of grammaticalization. To put it exactly, the changes that the prenominal type of relatives underwent did not result from any gradual extraposing or postposing of the relative clause, but by starting anew, in other words, the old relativizers (or zero relativizer) are replaced by the new ones, but relative clauses are always immediately attached to the head noun in the matrix. By contrast, the postnominal type of relative clauses represented by zhe-relative in Chinese, that-relative in English and those in Hittite underwent great changes in the history of development that resulted either from extraposing because of the topicalization of relativized noun phrases, or postposing because of the "heavy constituent shift". In addition, it is discovered in the study that secondary, [+case] relativization strategies applied to different relative clauses of pronominal type in Chinese are associated with the lower end of the case hierarchy; that primary, [-case] strategies applied shows a tendency of moving rightward along the case hierarchy , though this trend proceeds very slowly. Even to the present day, noun phrases in positions to the right of direct object on the case hierarchy are inaccessible to relativization without the application of [+case] strategies.